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Sandy Through The Eyes of YouTube and a Drone: Falling Trees, Fires and Flooding

While many a professional reporter stood in the rain and flowing water to capture dramatic footage of Hurricane Sandy, some of the most powerful documentation came instead from people in their homes using their camera phones to record the storm and the chaos that ensued, such as explosions at the 14th Street power station. In this video, for example, John Mateer, 16, begins by kiddingly filming his Wantagh, N.Y., street and saying, “This is the apocalypse.” But then it actually turns into one:

Watching that, I felt like I was back on the Disaster Ride at Universal Studios.

This second video was shot by a man on vacation from the United Kingdom. He chose an unfortunate time to visit his family in Brooklyn. The first few minutes of this video capture the terror in a house rapidly filling with water:

The rest of the video is filmed with the man’s newly built TBS Discovery quadcoptor drone. The film lacks expertise, due in part to the drone not seeming capable of flying very high. The man is obviously not a professional drone journalist, though at the 9:25 mark, he does capture some incredible footage of the devastation wrought in the neighborhood with bird’s eye views of trees that have crashed into a house and a power line.

You get a sense from the film of how useful it could be to have drones in New York airspace to record what happened there without having people dangerously wandering around with cameras. For now, drone use is heavily regulated and limited to hobbyists, law enforcement and government actors. But once private use of drones for commercial purposes is made legal, media organizations will certainly be using them to gather news footage at times like these.

NewsCorp, for one, must be itching to send its Daily Drone out for a spin this week. Unfortunately, the FAA currently frowns on that.

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